Wednesday, April 18, 2007

London Book Fair

Popped into the London Book Fair on my way home from a meeting in town last night and wanted to record the impressions – and that’s all they are after just an hour there. It had a good atmosphere with the show split into sections based on content like children’s and design and art. As you would expect Penguin had a big stand and there was representation from Faber and Faber and Bloomsbury but apart from that it was mainly foreign publishers and a lot of foreign language books.

If you were coming away with a gut feeling you would say publishing as an industry is alive and well but there could have been more of a British presence. Also for those people looking for the impact of technology the presence of Google and Microsoft was all that I discovered so it seems there is a little bit of a reality and hype gap at work on that front.